This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Monday, January 11, 2016

SCHOOLS AREN'T STARTUPS AND KIDS AREN'T CONSUMERS

Op-Ed in the L.A. Times by Karen Hunter Quartz | http://lat.ms/1W01tSH

"Edupreneurship is designed to unleash creative energy into
conservative school systems and disrupt longstanding patterns of
underachievement. But if that comes at the expense of our common good,
it threatens the very foundation of public schooling."

Jan 11, 2016 :: The Los Angeles Unified School District
will wrestle with enormous challenges in the year ahead. It's on the
brink of financial insolvency, enrollment is dropping, and its board is
about to hire a new superintendent to fix these fiscal problems.
The
new superintendent will face more than money issues, though. A
philosophical controversy is also churning inside LAUSD: Should LAUSD
become a competitive marketplace of schools, or grow as a democratic
civic institution?
Looking back at the events of last fall, it's clear how high the stakes are in this debate.

In September, a proposal from Great Public Schools Now, an initiative led by billionaire Eli Broad,
unleashed ferocious debate. Rife with business-speak, it suggested
LAUSD could be fixed by attracting edupreneurs to launch 260 new charter
schools that would capture 50% of the district's “market share” by
2023. Within weeks, battle lines were drawn. Rallying
anti-charter-school activists, former school board president Jackie
Goldberg declared “This is war!”

On its website, the teacher's union
posted “Hit the Road, Broad.”

Another coalition of local foundation leaders then
weighed in with its own open letter in November and offered to mediate.
Without taking sides, they cautioned that “intended reforms often fall
short if they are done to communities rather than with communities.”

Then,
in an abrupt turn, Great Public Schools Now announced in December that
it would channel its resources not just into adding more charter
schools, but into replicating models of success at traditional schools
as well. It released a list of 49 schools that were models of success,
42 of them magnets and charter schools. Both types of schools rely on
competitive admissions policies that are based on lotteries or criteria
such as giftedness.

The list's near-exclusive focus on charters
and magnets rather than neighborhood schools sends a powerful message
about how these private reformers want Angelenos to think about
education — as savvy consumers competing for scarce resources needed to
help their children get ahead.

What does this process of
edupreneurship and innovation look like on the ground? Magnets and
charters use aggressive recruitment campaigns to draw families with more
social capital away from their neighborhood public schools. The most
vulnerable children, then, are left behind in quickly emptying
buildings, which sit waiting for a Proposition 39 takeover bid, which
allows new charter schools to open in the unused classroom space.

A
philosophical controversy is also churning inside LAUSD: Should LAUSD
become a competitive marketplace of schools, or grow as a democratic
civic institution?-

The
charter school movement expects some of these new models to fail and
others to flourish. Great Public Schools Now is planning for that
future, advocating for an aggressive policy of closing schools that
don't measure up.

Focusing on outcomes at all costs may seem
reasonable because schools — and society — fail so many children. But
the urgency school developers feel to fix this situation doesn't warrant
the cavalier opening and closing of new models in response to market
demand.

Education reformer John Dewey in 1902 wrote about public
schools as the center of civic life — where people come together “by the
promotion of common sympathies and a common understanding.”

Successful
reform requires honoring that social contract between a community and
its neighborhood school. It requires dedicated educators, parents,
students, and community partners committed for the long haul. Today,
however, this deeply democratic way of thinking about schools is locked
in competition with the cult of innovation and plug-and-play culture
that drives markets.

There are other possibilities. For example,
five of the seven “traditional” schools that Great Public Schools Now
identified as models of success belong to the Pilot School movement,
teacher-led alternatives to charters that enroll neighborhood students.
Given autonomy and room to experiment in exchange for heightened
accountability, Pilot Schools partner with the teachers' union and
community to ensure reform is equitable and locally-rooted as well as
innovative and results-oriented.

My
point is not that one method of reform trumps all others. Rather, it's
that to ensure high-quality schools for all children requires
recognizing that public education is both an individual good that helps
people get ahead — “the great equalizer,” as Horace Mann put it in 1848 —
and a collective good that defines how we together determine our shared
fate.

Edupreneurship is designed to unleash creative energy into
conservative school systems and disrupt longstanding patterns of
underachievement. But if that comes at the expense of our common good,
it threatens the very foundation of public schooling.

Karen
Hunter Quartz is the director of research at the UCLA Community School, a
K-12 university-supported neighborhood public school in Pico
Union/Koreatown.